Home Country

There’s a rooster down the road who hasn’t quite figured out that his job starts at sunrise, not midnight. I know this because I was up at both hours, sitting on the porch with a cup of coffee gone cold, listening to the world do what it does best — just be itself.

That’s what Home Country is going to be about, friends. The world being itself. The small things. The things that don’t make the front page but probably should.

I was born sometime in the early 1940s, in a part of this country where the sky was big and the neighbors were far enough away that you had to mean it when you went to visit. Growing up rural will do something to a person. It either drives them toward the city lights as fast as their boots can carry them, or it settles into their bones like good weather, and they never quite shake it loose. I’m in that second group.

I started writing early — scribbling stories on whatever paper I could find, spinning yarns to anyone patient enough to listen. My mother called it a bad habit. My grandfather called it a gift. I sided with my grandfather.

Over the years, I’ve written books, columns, and enough words to paper a barn or two. Some of you may know me from my work celebrating the cowboys, the ranchers, the small-town folks who make up the backbone of this nation. I’ve always believed that Western culture — the real kind, not the Hollywood kind — is worth preserving, worth honoring, and most importantly, worth laughing about now and then.

Because that’s the thing about rural life. It’s hard, yes. The weather doesn’t care about your plans. The cattle don’t take weekends off. The fence always needs mending. But there is a joy in it — a deep, quiet, stubborn joy — that I’ve spent most of my life trying to put into words.

Home Country will be my attempt, week after week, to bring you a little piece of that joy. We’ll sit a spell with the neighbors. We’ll watch the seasons turn. We’ll listen to the old-timers and tip our hats to the land. And every now and then, we might just laugh until our sides ache.

I’m glad to be here, Sentinel-Times readers. Pull up a chair. Coffee’s on. — Slim Randles Home Country by Slim Randles runs weekly in the Sentinel-Times. Slim is a celebrated columnist and author whose writing has long championed the spirit of rural America and the traditions of the American West.